Irony County
If Fairfax County is ever looking for a new name, it might choose Irony County.
In this corner…the swanky shops of Tyson’s Corner, the magazine-cover homes of Great Falls, the high-end car dealerships along Route 7, the throbbing commerce of the Dulles corridor.
And in this corner…… 48,000 county residents at or below the federal poverty level, a large and growing disparity between the richest and poorest residents, steadily increasing social problems among families at the lowest end of the income scale.
As Verdia Haywood put it on Monday morning:
“We’ve got a county that doesn’t fit with its image.”
Haywood retired in January as Deputy Fairfax County Executive. For 30 years, he was in charge of human services programs in Fairfax, which is the most populous jurisdiction in the Washington metropolitan area (about 1.1 million residents).
On Monday, he was one of three speakers at a CEO breakfast organized by United Way of the National Capital Area.
In a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation, Haywood sketched a Fairfax that has changed dramatically since he arrived in 1978.
The county now has a minority population of 42 percent, about five times what it was when he started. Although Fairfax’s median household income is twice the national average, the poverty rate is growing at an “explosive” rate, he said.
Proof of the pudding:
• In 17 percent of the county’s public elementary schools, more than 50 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches.
• In the last seven years, the mean household income of the lowest-fifth in Fairfax has shrunk by more than 11 percent--while the mean income in the highest fifth has grown by more than six percent.
• Phone calls to the county government seeking emergency services were up 14 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009, and up 44 percent from fiscal 2007 to fiscal 2009.
These callers were seeking emergency food, jobs, food stamps, emergency utility assistance and subsidized housing.
Meanwhile, Haywood told the breakfast, binge drinking among Fairfax teenagers is a growing concern. So is gang involvement. Those problems and similar ones are worst in parts of the county where young people are not involved in community service or extracurricular activities, he said.
Haywood’s final slide dealt with dollars.
According to his figures, funding of nonprofits in Fairfax has dropped alarmingly since 2005. So has the “leverage value” of every social services dollar funneled to non-profits from the Fairfax County government.
Is there an answer? Haywood said that United Way of the National Capital Area comes closest.
He serves as a member of the Fairfax-Falls Church United Way Regional Council. In that role, he helps to direct community impact funds to local agencies and problems.
“Without United Way,” he said to me.
But he never finished that sentence. He could only shake his head.
In this corner…the swanky shops of Tyson’s Corner, the magazine-cover homes of Great Falls, the high-end car dealerships along Route 7, the throbbing commerce of the Dulles corridor.
And in this corner…… 48,000 county residents at or below the federal poverty level, a large and growing disparity between the richest and poorest residents, steadily increasing social problems among families at the lowest end of the income scale.
As Verdia Haywood put it on Monday morning:
“We’ve got a county that doesn’t fit with its image.”
Haywood retired in January as Deputy Fairfax County Executive. For 30 years, he was in charge of human services programs in Fairfax, which is the most populous jurisdiction in the Washington metropolitan area (about 1.1 million residents).
On Monday, he was one of three speakers at a CEO breakfast organized by United Way of the National Capital Area.
In a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation, Haywood sketched a Fairfax that has changed dramatically since he arrived in 1978.
The county now has a minority population of 42 percent, about five times what it was when he started. Although Fairfax’s median household income is twice the national average, the poverty rate is growing at an “explosive” rate, he said.
Proof of the pudding:
• In 17 percent of the county’s public elementary schools, more than 50 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches.
• In the last seven years, the mean household income of the lowest-fifth in Fairfax has shrunk by more than 11 percent--while the mean income in the highest fifth has grown by more than six percent.
• Phone calls to the county government seeking emergency services were up 14 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009, and up 44 percent from fiscal 2007 to fiscal 2009.
These callers were seeking emergency food, jobs, food stamps, emergency utility assistance and subsidized housing.
Meanwhile, Haywood told the breakfast, binge drinking among Fairfax teenagers is a growing concern. So is gang involvement. Those problems and similar ones are worst in parts of the county where young people are not involved in community service or extracurricular activities, he said.
Haywood’s final slide dealt with dollars.
According to his figures, funding of nonprofits in Fairfax has dropped alarmingly since 2005. So has the “leverage value” of every social services dollar funneled to non-profits from the Fairfax County government.
Is there an answer? Haywood said that United Way of the National Capital Area comes closest.
He serves as a member of the Fairfax-Falls Church United Way Regional Council. In that role, he helps to direct community impact funds to local agencies and problems.
“Without United Way,” he said to me.
But he never finished that sentence. He could only shake his head.
posted by Bob Levey's United Way at
1:20 PM
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